The in-home Local Area Network (LAN) traffic model is beginning to change due to Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the storage of large multimedia collections on various devices coupled to the in-home LAN. For example, a consumer may have multiple Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), such as the TiVo Series 2 PVR, connected to the consumer's in-home LAN, wherein multimedia content may be transferred from one PVR to another via the in-home LAN. The most common in-home LANs are wireless LANs formed using local wireless access points, such as IEEE 802.11 access points. The resulting problem is that transferring multimedia files between devices, such as PVRs, using a traditional wireless LAN results in very inefficient use of the limited unlicensed radio frequency (RF) spectrum. More specifically, if, for example, the IEEE 802.11g communication standard is used, each transfer of a multimedia file uses a first portion of the IEEE 802.11g RF spectrum for a first wireless communication link between a source device and the access point and a second portion of the IEEE 802.11g RF spectrum for a second wireless communication link between the access point and a destination device. Further, contention for bandwidth at the access point as packets are switched from receive to transmit adds additional delay, thereby further wasting the RF spectrum and compute cycles on the PVRs and access point. Overall, this transfer process can be slow and burdensome to the application performing the file transfer. In addition, the Quality-of-Service (QOS) for other wireless connections and applications currently using the access point is also impaired.
Thus, there is a need for a system and method for efficiently transferring data files between devices in a wireless LAN.